THE Global Justice Movement Website

Friday, August 31, 2018

Perhaps not surprisingly, there is
not much good news this week, or at least we haven’t been able to find it.What little there is seems to be internal,
e.g., some important publications are in the works for CESJ, and there has been
a great deal of interest expressed in the projects.As for the rest of the world:

Thursday, August 30, 2018

As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, “the
New Christianity”/”Neo-Catholicism” — euphemisms for “the democratic religion”
of socialism — was a serious problem in the early nineteenth century — and not
one confined to religious society.The
sea change in how people viewed the human person and his or her place in the world
was devastating.It undermined
fundamental principles of the entire social order in all its aspects, religious,
civil, and domestic.The social
earthquake triggered by the French Revolution has had aftershocks lasting down
to the present day.

Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Recently Alexis
Tsipras, the Prime Minister of Greece, has declared the end of the bailout of
the country, proclaiming a “day of liberation.”Greece has completed a three-year emergency loan program worth €61.9
billion to tackle its debt crisis. It
was part of the biggest bailout in history, totaling approximately €289 billion,
which will take the country decades to repay. Cuts in public spending, especially for social
welfare programs, will continue.

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, in
November 1831, calling themselves “the Pilgrims of God and Liberty,” de
Lamennais, Montalembert, and Lacordaire set out for Rome to present their case
to the pope.Much to de Lamennais’s
annoyance, the trio was not granted an audience immediately, although that
should have been expected in light of the fact that they showed up in Rome
without warning.

Monday, August 27, 2018

How to reach Bernie Fans?Why would we want to do that?Well, why not?Bernie Sanders has a following, and people
pay attention to what he says, he’s concerned about things — and he is a strong
supporter of worker ownership.It should
be a pretty short step for him to see that if ownership for workers is good,
ownership for everyone is better, and can accomplish most if not all of the
goals he says he wants to achieve through redistribution.Why do it the hard way?

Friday, August 24, 2018

In case you were wondering how
people are benefiting from all the presumably wonderful economic growth (e.g., the stock market booming, falling
unemployment, protection of America’s infant industries, etc.), it’s a good idea to keep in mind that there is a difference
between the collective and the individual human person.In the aggregate — the collective sense —
things may be going great, per capita
income is $1 million . . . except that means one person gets $300 million a
year, and the other 299,999,999 people get zip.And why not redistribute by abolishing private property for one guy so
the 299,999,999 can have it?Because
abolishing private property for one means abolishing it for all.Why not just figure out a way to make
everybody productive instead of just one person?Or you end up with what we have today:

Thursday, August 23, 2018

As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, if
there was one thing that both the Catholic Church and the Church of England had
in common in the early nineteenth century, it was “religious
indifferentism.”Although it stemmed
from different causes in each country, the widespread neglect of religious
duties and the belief that all religions are essentially the same was a serious
problem in both France and England.

Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Senator Elizabeth Ann Warren (Democrat, Massachusetts) has
created a bit of a stir with her “Accountable Capitalism Act” proposal.The ACA is a proposed piece of legislation
recently introduced by Senator Warren that she believes would restore
accountability of corporations to their employees and to the public at
large.At the heart of her proposal is
her oft-repeated declaration that “corporations are not people.”

Tuesday, August 21, 2018

In the previous posting on this subject we mentioned that
as early as the 1820s in France there were a significant number of sects of the
“democratic religion” — socialism — springing up everywhere.Within a generation there had grown to be so
many that Alexis de Tocqueville commented in his recollections of the 1848
Revolution,

Monday, August 20, 2018

Every organization needs not
only a mission statement and a business plan — and yes, even non-profits need a
“business plan” because if you cannot state clearly why your organization
exists . . . why does it exist?Further,
the more vague or general an organization’s mission statement (e.g., “The Much Ado About Nothing
Society works to promote interest in William
Topaz McGonagall (1825-1902), the greatest poet who ever lived or ever
will live, and to jabber on endlessly without knowing anything about him.”*)
the more chance there is that the organization will eventually lose its
way.It may continue, but more and more
people will simply ask Why?

Friday, August 17, 2018

Talk on “the Street” (when it’s
capitalized like that it’s Wall Street, because that’s where everything is capitalized
. . . right? Wrong, but we won’t go into
that today) is that consumer spending is up, up, up, and that’s a good thing,
right?Yes, it’s a very good thing . . .
assuming it’s in response to people being able to meet their needs and reasonable
wants out of current income.When it
involves buying luxuries on credit — or, worse, necessities on credit — it’s a
very, very bad thing . . . but that’s what’s happening, even though that part
of the equation is being ignored or downplayed.In other news:

Thursday, August 16, 2018

As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, disconnecting
ordinary people from the ability to produce and the resulting loss of power had
serious repercussions throughout the social order in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries.Traditional
institutions no longer seemed able to fill human wants and needs, whether material,
moral, or spiritual, and were increasingly seen as irrelevant or, worse,
opposed to human development.

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

The situation between John Henry Newman and Orestes
Brownson described in the previous posting on this subject had not sprung from
out of nowhere.Nor were they the only
ones confronted with what looked like an attack on the very fabric of the
social order itself.

Tuesday, August 14, 2018

At the end of the previous posting on this subject, we
noted that some people with agendas had found what they wanted in John Henry
Newman’s book, An Essay on the
Development of Christian Doctrine.The
problem was that what they claimed to have found was the opposite of what
Newman had actually written.

Monday, August 13, 2018

This week your host Dave
Hamill talks with Monica Woodman from Cleveland, Ohio.Monica comes to the Just Third Way naturally. Her father, Bob Woodman, was one of the movement’s earliest supporters, and
her siblings are also very strong in their support of the Just Third Way.It’s a kind of family heritage with the
Woodmans, so let’s hear what Monica has to say:

Friday, August 10, 2018

Panic in the streets.Again.As this is being written, the stock market is crashing.Again.Don’t worry, though.Give it
another hour or two and it will be back up.After all, it doesn’t really measure anything except people’s inability
to recall what happened fifteen minutes ago.Other things are of more concern, such as the surge in support for “democratic
socialism” . . . which might not be all that worrisome, either, despite the
hysteria from both ends of the spectrum.Of course, if people would get off the spectrum altogether and on to the
Just Third Way, then a lot of things that take up far too much of their time
could take a back seat to what is really important: actually living life:

Thursday, August 9, 2018

John Henry Newman was arguably the most notable English
convert to Catholicism in the nineteenth century.We only qualify that statement because if we
didn’t, we would get a flood of emails demanding to know why we didn’t consider
so-and-so or detailing alleged faults of Newman that presumably disqualify him
from a position of preëminence.

Wednesday, August 8, 2018

As we saw in the previous posting on this subject,
American liberalism that sounded very good in theory has a serious flaw in
practice.It is not too far out of the
realm of possibility that this flaw may have contributed to John Henry Newman’s
inability to see any difference between the English and European types of
liberalism and the American type.We
refer, of course, to chattel slavery.

Tuesday, August 7, 2018

As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, we have been looking at American type liberalism as
fundamentally different from the English and European types.Our case is based on the claim that European
type liberalism vests sovereignty in the collective, while English type
liberalism puts it in an élite.

Monday, August 6, 2018

This week’s Just Third Way
Podcast is the second part of a rebroadcast of a “FOCUS” (Follow One Course
Until Successful) show with host Meshorn Daniels and guest Dr. Norman G. Kurland.Again we invite you to sit back and enjoy!

Friday, August 3, 2018

This week we cover news items from
Japan to the Vatican, and that span nearly a century . . . but that you can
still read quickly.Don’t be worried,
however.The only controversial thing we
cover is expanded capital ownership, which is very upsetting to the increasing
numbers of democratic socialists:

Thursday, August 2, 2018

Following up on the previous posting on this subject, answering the question What is liberalism? is key to
understanding the life and times of John Henry Newman, particularly since what
has baffled many Newman scholars is the fact that he claimed to be against all
forms of liberalism and yet held many opinions and took many positions that people
today regard as liberal.Part of this
may be due to the possibility that Newman seems to have had trouble viewing
this world as anything other than a temporary stopping place on the way to the
next.

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, John
Henry Newman based his thought firmly on the idea that the human person is of
paramount importance.At the same time,
he failed to account for (or possibly only failed to appreciate) the fact that
human beings, while remaining individuals, are also social, a possibly unique
combination Aristotle called “political.”This may, in part, have caused him to lump all types of liberalism
together under the umbrella of what he called “the Anti-dogmatic Principle,”
which is to say to someone like Newman, “the Anti-truth Principle.”